AWS Key Services Every Developer Should Know — A Practical Guide

This article summarizes the essential AWS services you must know to build, deploy, secure, and scale modern applications.

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Compute

• EC2 — VM instances with OS-level control.
• Lambda — Event-driven serverless compute.
• ECS/EKS/Fargate — Container orchestration and serverless container runtime.

Storage

• S3 — Object storage for binaries, logs, backups.
• EBS — Block-level storage for EC2.
• EFS — Distributed NFS file system.

Databases

• RDS — Managed SQL engines (MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc.).
• DynamoDB — Fully managed NoSQL key-value database.
• ElastiCache — Redis/Memcached for caching.

Networking

• VPC — Isolated cloud network environment.
• Route53 — DNS and traffic routing.
• API Gateway — REST/WebSocket interface for serverless and microservices.

Security

• IAM — Identity & access management.
• KMS — Encryption key management.
• Secrets Manager — Secure credential storage.
• Shield/WAF — DDoS and app-layer protection.

DevOps

• CodePipeline — CI/CD orchestration.
• CloudWatch — Monitoring and observability.
• CloudTrail — Full audit log for the AWS account.

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Final Thoughts

Mastering these services provides a solid foundation for building scalable cloud-native applications on AWS.